Wonderful Things to Read

For those essay aficionados, I am currently reading The Seagull Reader (which has to be a direct ripoff of The Penguin Reader, but what can you expect from Norton?) Nevertheless, it has tons of great, thought-provoking essays. Some of my favorites include:
1. "Graduation" by Maya Angelou. You may have read this in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but it's worth reading again. It's very poignant and makes you question our own (sometimes low) expectations that we quite often unknowingly place on others.
2. "Why Don't We Complain Anymore?" by William F. Buckley Jr. Although it was written on a train in 1961, it's just as true today: people are afraid to complain. He writes of the train being 85 degrees and yet not a single person wants to complain to the conductor, so they all just sit there, sweating and sticking their heads out of the window. He says, "We are all increasingly anxious in America to be unobtrusive," which I think is an incredibly accurate statement, even 45 years later.
3. "Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. This is an essay every person, black, white, old, young, should read. It does not preach liberal or conservative values, it simply speaks of basic human rights in such a eloquent, understated manner that you may find yourself inexplicably moved to tears while reading. It also makes you ashamed that something as basic as human rights have been corrupted and manipulated by our heavily split partisan system.
My favorite part: "I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
4. Absolutely anything by Joan Didion. She is my favorite essayist, not only because she is both accessible and yet somehow erudite, she is also from the Central Valley, and much of what she writes is influenced by her childhood in the dusty heart of California. If you read her with a highlighter you will find that entire pages will be yellow. And every blogger should read "On Keeping a Notebook" because it defines what we all do here: talk about ourselves.